For­mer cul­ture min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell has crit­i­cised Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar af­ter she sug­gest­ed the Op­po­si­tion should in­vite Star Sab­ga and Jen­na Hadeed to per­form at fu­ture Eman­ci­pa­tion cel­e­bra­tions.

With Eman­ci­pa­tion Day just past, imag­ine an is­land with a church, a ceme­tery and chil­dren run­ning be­neath co­conut trees. Fam­i­lies have lived there for gen­er­a­tions and their dead lie with­in earshot of the sea. Then, in dis­tant cap­i­tals, men un­fold a map and de­cide that the is­land is strate­gi­cal­ly in­dis­pens­able. Its peo­ple are told, per­haps not in words, but un­mis­tak­ably in pol­i­cy, that their homes ob­struct se­cu­ri­ty, their his­to­ry can be fold­ed in­to a suit­case, and their be­long­ings mat­ter less than a mil­i­tary base.

​Swim­mers Dy­lan Carter and Nikoli Black­man, along­side cy­clist Te­niel Camp­bell, earned Trinidad and To­ba­go a gold, a bronze, and a sil­ver medal, re­spec­tive­ly, on day nine of the Cen­tral Amer­i­can and Caribbean (CAC) Games on Sat­ur­day in San­to Domin­go, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic.

As Trinidad and To­ba­go marks the Eman­ci­pa­tion Day hol­i­day this week­end, the sound of ring­ing bells, the pow­er­ful rhythm of drums and the soul­ful voic­es ris­ing in Spir­i­tu­al Bap­tist church­es across the coun­try serve as a re­minder that the jour­ney to free­dom did not end with the abo­li­tion of slav­ery. It con­tin­ued through gen­er­a­tions of strug­gle for cul­tur­al recog­ni­tion, re­li­gious ex­pres­sion and the preser­va­tion of iden­ti­ty.

Whilst for­mer prime min­is­ter Bas­deo Pan­day fa­mous­ly said that pol­i­tics has a moral­i­ty of its own, build­ing and main­tain­ing a con­sti­tu­tion­al democ­ra­cy is found­ed on a few ba­sic prin­ci­ples and a com­mit­ment to main­tain­ing those prin­ci­ples by more than mere lip ser­vice.